UN urged to look at uni fees system

October 5, 2004 — 10.00am

The UN has been petitioned to investigate whether Australia is in violation of international law for not providing free higher education.

The 1976 covenant on economic, social and cultural rights requires signatory nations such as Australia to make higher education "equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education".

In a letter to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Victorian human rights experts Mike Salvaris and Di Otto said "there can be no doubt" that the HECS loans system and full-fee places put the Federal Government and Australian universities in breach of the covenant.

They argue that Australia has the financial capacity to maintain higher levels of public spending. "The introduction and steady increase of tertiary fees is a real barrier that prevents many young Australians from lower income and disadvantaged backgrounds from gaining access to tertiary education," the letter said. Associate Professor Otto is an expert in human rights and criminal law at Melbourne University.

Professor Salvaris, a human rights academic from Victoria University, said Australia's institutions needed a big stick taken to them as they had fundamental human rights obligations as public organisations. With the federal election less than a week away, Professor Salvaris said it was time the major political parties moved the debate away from the economies of universities and towards the human right to education.

"Both of the political parties are complicit. The Labor Party introduced HECS and the Liberal Party has accelerated fees," he said. The petition to the UN could lead to action by student groups under state equal opportunity laws on the grounds that fees were unfair to financially disadvantaged students, he said.

In 2002, the same UN committee found that the tuition fees and student loans in Britain were "inconsistent" with the covenant and "tended to worsen the position of students from less privileged backgrounds".